Not only do things get worse before they get better some
things are best when they start bad and stay that way. Evidence the
Cherry Sisters.

It's 1896: no radio, no TV; motion pictures as
popular entertainment still a few years away. Berliner (discs) and
Edison (cylinders) are laying the groundwork for the record industry. No
cars, no planes. The epicenter of public amusement is the theater.
Itinerant performers singers, jugglers, dog acts, pianists, minstrels,
and seltzer-siphon buffoons work the circuit known as
"Vaudeville." There were stars, like Nora Bayes, Fanny Brice,
and Sophie Tucker and there were the Cherry Sisters. Their closest late
20th-century analogue might be aboriginal rock legends the Shaggs minus
the talentor a reduced-rate Del Rubio Triplets with even lousier
makeup.

The sisters Effie, Addie, Ella, Jessie and Elizabeth, of
Marion, Iowa were by contemporary accounts the worst act in vaudeville.
Unadulterated stinkeroo. Their show, Something Good, Something
Sad, was so atrocious it triggered a perverse public hysteria: it
played to sold-out New York houses for ten weeks. It put impresario
Oscar Hammerstein's career in turnaround and rescued his floundering
Olympia Music Hall from the brink of bankruptcy.

November 16 marks the 100th anniversary of the sisters' "heralded" opening on the Great White Way. Don't bother sending a card the whole family has gone to the one place even FedEx doesn't deliver. The last of the sisters all childless spinsters died in 1944. Their brother Nathan went to Chicago in 1885 and was never heard from again.

The Cherrys'
rise to the bottom began with an innocent ambition: earning enough money
to visit the 1893 Chicago World's Fair (and perhaps to find Nathan). The
prairie-bred farmgirls burned the gaslamps beyond bedtime hammering
together an evening's worth of hokey, moralistic one-acts, derivative
ballads, and awkward ethnic dialect routines. With no prior experience
before the footlights, they trod the boards before uncritical friends in
their home village. Encouraged by neighborly applause and a modest
profit the Cherrys took their cockeyed show on the road. They
barnstormed through such 19th-century cultural citadels as Ottumwa,
Muscatine, and Osage.

Slogging through the marshes and municipal
auditoriums of the midwest, the sisters were so awful that audience
heckling seemed too polite; instead, patrons conveyed their critical
consensus by flinging cabbages and overripe tomatoes. At a Creston,
Iowa, town hall performance, theater-goers threw eggs and chased the
girls offstage. To protect her siblings, Addie at least once brandished
a shotgun at an overly rambunctious crowd. One regional reviewer
described them as "wretchedly poor, homely, ignorant, and without a
trace of taste." In Cedar Rapids, where the backwater Bernhardts
rented Greene's Opera House for 50 bucks, their gawky revue got a noisy
reception patrons blew tin horns left over from the 1892 presidential
campaign. The sisters mistook the raucousness for approval, and
considered the evening a huge success. Next day, they were horrified by
a nasty review in the Cedar Rapids Gazette, which stated:

"If some indefinable instinct of modesty could not have
warned them that they were acting the part of monkeys, it does seem like
the overshoes thrown at them would convey the idea.... Cigars,
cigarettes, rubbers everything was thrown at them, yet they stood there,
awkwardly bowing their acknowledgments and singing on."

Their honor at stake, they sued the city editor for slander. Justice
was uncommonly swift. A theatrical trial was held the following day at
Greene's, with the Cherrys mounting the stage for the benefit of the
magistrate, offering their performance as testimony. The jury,
confronted with the evidence of the plaintiffs' far graver crime,
nevertheless found the editor guilty and sentenced him to marry one of
the sisters. (All parties declined to enforce the ruling.)

From Davenport to Vinton, month after month, the onslaught of rotten eggs and pension-aged fruit continued. At one show, patrons of the arts pitched slabs of fresh liver at the hapless troupe; in Dubuque, they were greeted by "a volley of turnips." Singing for your supper is one thing; having it hurled at you overhand is another. Finally, a
compassionate promoter erected a wire-mesh screen between players and
audience. The sisters virtuous ladies whose lips never tasted wine (they
once refused to speak to their piano player for a week because he said
"damn")suspected that the unruly mob behavior had been
instigated by stage managers whose (imagined) advances they'd rebuffed.
Everywhere they went, it rained cabbages, potatoes, rutabagas any local
crop surplus. One rowdy spectator heaved an old tin wash boiler onstage.

Then, things got ugly.

In February 1898, following a
typical Cherry freakshow in western Iowa, Odebolt Chronicle
editor William Hamilton wrote:

"When the curtain went
up...[t]he audience saw three creatures surpassing the witches in
Macbeth in general hideousness. ... Their long, skinny arms, equipped
with talons at the extremities, swung mechanically , and anon were waved
frantically at the suffering audience. The mouths of their rancid
features opened like caverns, and sounds like the wailing of damned
souls issued therefrom. They pranced around the stage...strange
creatures with painted features and hideous mien. Effie is spavined,
Addie is knock-kneed and string-halt, and Jessie, the only one who
showed her stockings, has legs without calves, as classic in their
outlines as the curves of a broom handle."

Tomaters
and warshbuckets they could deal with, but this this clearly crossed the
line. Two weeks later, when the Des Moines Leader reprinted this
passage, the Cherrys sued for libel. In a precedent-setting 1899
decision after what legal documents disclose was a very colorful
trial!the suit was dismissed, with the court affirming a newspaper's
right to criticize public performers to the point of ridicule. In 1901,
the Iowa Supreme Court upheld Cherry v. Des Moines Leader,
noting: "If there ever was a case justifying ridicule and
sarcasm...it is the one now before us... [T]he performance given by the
[sisters] was not only childish, but ridiculous in the extreme. A
dramatic critic should be allowed considerable license in such a
case."

·

Backtrack to 1896: while
the Cherrys were quickening their reflexes dodging several of the major
food groups, in New York, impresario Oscar Hammerstein had major
migraines. At his new "uptown" Olympia Music Hall at Broadway
and 44th Street, he'd staged a series of big-name showcases which
flopped.The venue, surrounded by smelly stables and a blacksmith
forge, was inconveniently located; the theater district was a half-mile
away at old Herald Square. A story in the Morning World about the
Cherrys, then touring the midwest, caught his eye. They were described
as "so grim and so serious that audiences were rolling in the
aisles with laughter." Hammerstein mulled the possibilities.
"I've been putting on the best talent, and it hasn't gone
over," he acknowledged. "I'm going to try the worst." He
dispatched stage manager Al Aarons to lasso the Cherrys (minus Ella, who
wisely retired) and shepherd them east under contract. Tomato futures
skyrocketed.

On November, 16, 1896, Something Good, Something
Sad, opened at the Olympia. According to one unattributed press
account, "the four grim-faced [sisters] sidled out on the stage in
hand-made red calico dresses and began their act." Elizabeth played
piano and Jessie slammed a huge bass drum while the sisters sang:

"Cherries ripe, Boom-de-ay!

Cherries red, Boom-de-ay!

The Cherry
sisters

Have come to stay!"

Next,
Jessie, draped in an American flag, sang an original, patriotic number
entitled "Fair Columbia." Lizzie followed with what must have
been a jaw-dropping version of a traditional Irish ballad sung with a
twang. In Effie's vocal centerpiece, "The Gipsy's Warning,"
Jessie portrayed a barefoot flower maiden falling prey to a
swashbuckling Lothario, played by Addie. Later in the evening, a
"living sculpture" tableau entitled "Clinging to the
Cross" featured Jessie suspended from a giant crucifix.

The
first-night reviews were merciless. "It was awful," claimed
the World. The New York Times critic commented, "All
too obviously they were products of the barnyard and the kitchen. None
of them had showed a sign of nervousness, none a trace of ability for
their chosen work." Another press witness, cited in a 1936 New
York World-Telegram obit for Elizabeth, stated, "A locksmith
with a strong, rasping file could earn ready wages taking the kinks out
of Lizzie's voice."

According to a 1944 article in the
World-Telegram (published upon Effie's death), the act had been
greeted with "a stock of tomatoes, cabbages and onions, [and] a
great racket of screeches, yowls, hoorahs and catcalls."
Hammerstein assured his headliners that the barrage was orchestrated by
jealous rival stars, "who hire people to throw things at girls like
you." (In fact, the owner had recruited his sons, Arthur and Will,
to incite the "truck-garden bouquets.") "Your talent is
so great," he explained, "that you can expect fruit and
vegetables to be thrown at every performance." Behind the now-de
rigueur fishnet, the Cherrys played to packed houses for two months,
earning upwards of a grand per week. It saved Hammerstein's
derrièreand his theater. Following their run at the Olympia, the
gutsy quartet played an additional two weeks at Proctor's 23rd Street
Theater to continued SRO houses.

Despite their celebrity, the
schoolmarmish Cherrys rejected New York's glamorous nightlife. "We
were invited to parties by Lillian Russell, Diamond Jim Brady, John L.
Sullivan and others," they told "Voice of Broadway"
columnist Louis Sobol, "but we never accepted." Usually, after
the pulp-splattered curtain came down, the ladies took dinner at the
Holland House, then went straight to bed. Occasionally they'd take
horse-drawn buggy rides through Central Park, but not after dusk.
"We always wanted to see Coney Island," they told Sobol,
"but we did not want to see women in bathing suits."

The triumphant Cherry Sisters embarked on a US-Canadian tour, drawing
sell-out crowds at most engagements. Having achieved notoriety in New
York, their reputation preceded them at every whistlestop. In
Marshalltown, Iowa, a theater sign proclaimed:

Iowa's
Famous Songbirds

Bad Eggs, Black Powder and

Ten-Gauge Guns Barred

Audiences hooted, howled,
and heaved, but the gals persevered, chalking it up to jealous
competitors. In all their days on the road, the sisters never lost a
note nor found one.

When Jessie, the youngest, died in 1903 of
typhoid fever, the sisters quit the circuit and retired to their Iowa
farm. They'd amassed a fortune estimated around $200,000. The
American Weekly noted that over seven years of touring, "They
began as the four worst professional actresses in the world and ended
without improving one iota." Considering the onslaught they
endured, particularly before the screens were installed, it was a
blessing that no one was seriously injured by a wayward projectile. One
journalist attributed this miracle to "nervous marksmanship on one
side and amazing agility on the other."

None ever married
in fact, they boasted of never having been kissed. ("We are too
devoted to each other to consider matrimony and we could never stand the
shock of being dictated to by a man.") Within a few years of
returning home, they were once again destitute. They eventually lost the
farm and moved to Cedar Rapids, where they opened a bakery. Cherry pie,
naturally, was a specialty. A local lad fondly recalled seeing a sign in
the window: "Fresh Bread and Bull Pups for Sale."

Sadly (but understandably), the Cherrys were never invited to make
commercial recordings; however, Jessie cut a demo disc of her
show-stopping "Fair Columbia." A few years after her death, a
brief item appeared in an Iowa paper noting that the surviving sibs were
trying to buy the disc from its owner so they could hear their dear,
dead sister's voice. Problem was, they couldn't afford the asking price
of $100. (The record's eventual disposition is unknown; it's probably in
an attic somewhere, alongside the missing reels of von Stroheim's
Greed.) Effie ran for mayor of Cedar Rapids twice, in 1924 and
1926, losing both times. Her William Jennings Bryanesque platform
(anti-tobacco and no-liquor; longer skirts, longer hair and longer
consciences for women; and a 7 o'clock curfew for minors) was decidedly
out of step with the Roaring Twenties, even in the flat-earth precincts
of Iowa.

When their money ran out, the surviving Cherrys
attempted comebacks, but their luck seemed to have run out as well. At a
Chicago theater in 1913, first night receipts were $7. The second night
gate figures improved to $11. (The tally did not include the value of
airborne produce.) The sisters blamed the dismal turnout on "lack
of publicity." In 1935, the proprietor of The Gay Nineties, a New
York nostalgia venue, brought Addie and Effie back to town with much
fanfare but their compelling, negative charisma had evaporated.
"Some of the club's cash customers merely yawned and ordered the
waiter to bring two more, quick," reported the American
Weekly. "Others wanted to know if this was supposed to be
funny, while many simply moaned and went out." The pathetic sight
of two frumpy hags in high-button shoes trying to entertain jaded
patrons in a New York nightclub must have been too painful to endure.

Addie died in 1942, and Effie the last of the line two years
later, forever sparing the world's gene pool. (They never revealed their
ages, but both were estimated octogenarians.) In an August 12, 1944
obituary, the World-Telegram's Burton Rascoe sensed an element of
martyrdom in their Sisyphean plight. He lamented that the Cherry family
"summed up in themselves, and took the blame for, all the bad
acting in the world....They were the targets for abuse that should have
been more equitably distributed."

·

How could anyone let alone an entire sibling clan be so stupid, so
dense, so blind to such overwhelming public derision? This is the
question Jack El-Hai addressed in "The Mystery of the Cherry
Sisters," published in the Summer 1996 issue of Tractor, an
Iowa arts and culture zine (available for $3 from Legion Arts, 1103
Third St. SE, Cedar Rapids, IA 52401). El-Hai, a Minneapolis-based
freelance journalist, has dogged the Cherrys' legacy since 1993. With a
grant from the Center for Arts Criticism in St. Paul, he visited Cedar
Rapids, scoured the archives in Iowa City, made a pilgrimage to Marion,
and drafted a book proposal. He's read Effie's unpublished novel
("it's terrible," he said in a phone interview) and her
unlikely-to-be-a-major-motion-picture memoirs ("not exactly
gripping"). He even poked around Chicago for traces of the elusive
brother Nathan, to no avail. (Perhaps he should have checked '60s Mayor
Richard Daley's voter registration rolls.)

The title of El-Hai's
article is deliberately provocative. He admitted there are many
mysteries about the sisters, but one supersedes all others: "Were
the Cherrys conscious of their own badness, and did they try to be bad
in order to please their audiences?"

After a thorough study
of the sisters' stern moral underpinnings, El-Hai grew convinced there
was method to their badness. They were a "strange mixture of
Puritanism and exhibitionism," he observed. Avery Hale, in a
December 1944 remembrance in Coronet magazine, wrote that the
Cherrys often attended cliché-ridden, off-circuit productions at
Greene's Opera House in their formative years. They were "deeply
impressed" by these programs in which "virtue was usually
melodramatically triumphant and retribution caught up with the
silk-hatted villain just before the last-act curtain." If America
was to overcome the forces of darkness, the Cherrys felt destined to
carry the lantern.

"They hated women performers who made
the most of sex appeal," El-Hai explained, "especially Mae
West, who included a disparaging line about the Sisters in one of her
films." When it came to morality, Effie, in particular, couldn't
get off the soapbox. "Woman has been degraded by nudity on the
stage today," she railed in 1934. "I'd clean up all the filthy
literature and periodicals...It is woman's place to wage war against sin
which has infested us for so long." She thought ladies shouldn't
smoke in public because "it loses their charm and makes them appear
too masculine." (In the sisters' heyday, Jessie had sung a
cautionary tale of lost virtue entitled "My First Cigar.")
Effie's mayoral platform advocated civic cleanliness, ankle-length
skirts, and "more and bigger policemen." The Cherrys waged a
lifelong campaign against decadence, and the stage gave them an
opportunity, El-Hai said, "to become the theater's primary
exponents of decency."

Make no mistake the Cherrys were as
talent-free as critics insisted, and oblivious to that fact at the dawn
of their careers. "They couldn't have been good if they
tried," El-Hai believes. But having captured the public's attention
as "The World's Worst Sister Act" (as they were billed in St.
Louis), they weren't about to forsake fame to protect the family name.
The rewards headlines, packed halls, and money were too great to pass
up, even at the cost of public humiliation. Success was measured in
sheer numbers. El-Hai unearthed a telling 1936 quote from Effie, then
appearing with Addie at an Iowa radio station barn dance. Asked by a
broadcaster if their act was any good, Effie retorted, "Good?
There's 2,500 people out there, isn't there? Well, that's more than
[comedienne] Ina Claire drew in this same theater a while back and she's
good, isn't she?" As for the relentless caricature in the press,
the sisters gathered bad reviews like so many rose petals. "They
viewed being bad as a means to an end," El-Hai figures, "as a
way to keep themselves before audiences so they could uphold theatrical
decency."

Were they more sophisticated than they let on?
Did these hayseeds with pigslop under their fingernails parlay
ineptitude into a long-term publicity stunt? The sisters never blinked;
they played greenhorns to the hilt, onstage and off. "I can't
understand why we're persecuted as we are," said Addie. "Why,
prominent men have raised their hats when passing our house in Cedar
Rapids on the streetcar."

"Over the years,"
El-Hai discovered, "a mythology grew up around them about how bad
they were, what was thrown at them, why they persevered. It's almost
like they've become an urban legend." A true verdict on their
motivations may never be possible. "Either the Cherry Sisters are
completely sincere and take themselves seriously," said the Des
Moines Register, "or they are the most accomplished actresses
the world has ever known."